Waiting for COVID-19 in Makeni, Sierra Leone, by Susan Shepler (2020)
This is the third time I’ve fled Sierra Leone because of a crisis. The first was in May of 2000 during the tail end of the war, when…
Category: English
Nancy Mattina, “Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture” (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
Protégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College’s anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichar… Visit…
The ‘Invisible Enemy’: A Critical Look at the Use of Military Metaphors and Anthropomorphisation During The COVID-19 Pandemic
JAMES FOTHERBY In mid-March, before becoming infected with Coronavirus, Boris Johnson declared that his government must act like “any wartime government” while facing a deadly “enemy”. During John…
Forrest Stuart, “Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy” (Princeton UP, 2020)
How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of…
Haunted: Spirits and the Agency of the No Longer in Niger #Afterlives
In Niger one frequently hears that schools, specifically secondary schools, are haunted. Briefly put, this means that some schools are teeming with spirits, most of whom pose a…
A ‘grand projet’: Universal Health Coverage and social protection in Senegal by Anna Wood
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 4: A Conversation with Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program…
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 4: A Conversation with Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program…
Creation and Community: Making Mississippi Choctaw Arts
Creation and Community: Making Mississippi Choctaw Arts A Material Culture Studies Lecture by Emily Buhrow Rogers Thursday May 21, 2020 2–3 p.m. (EST) Email Jason Jackson at mchsl@indiana.edu…
COVID-19 and the Turn to Magical Thinking
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of unprecedented shock and trauma for many Africans. European invaders appeared, armed with guns for which African spears…
Awakening to being the “other” A schizophrenic streak
In discussions on COVID-19, it has become a common trope that disciplines like anthropology are particularly relevant and fitting for writing about the pandemic. Indeed, the pandemic unearths…
COVID-19, the Freedom to Die, and the Necropolitics of the Market by Vito Laterza
Field hospital constructed in Gothenburg, Sweden in March 2020. Photo: Helén Sjöland. While reading Giorgio Agamben’s (2020) anthropological note on the “danger” of habituation of Italians to…
HIV: God’s punishment for sexual deviants or a holy gift against Corona? by Tankut Atuk
In Turkey, HIV has never been considered a “Turkish” issue, but an issue of Eastern European sex workers and Western queers, both perceived as sexual deviants. However, according…
The Vanishing Land: In Search of a Myth for Samothraki
By Eleni Kotsira, University of St Andrews § It is an evening in the early days of August 2019. I am sitting at a café in an alleyway…
“There are worse places to spend a lockdown”: Privileged and at risk British retirees in Spain by Emma Fàbrega
It was a sunny Tuesday morning, at the beginning of March 2020. The dirt pétanque field in a Catalan coastal town was filled with English chatter about golf,…
Would you consider writing your reports backwards?
In the scope of the contemporary planetary crisis this post probably qualifies as less urgent and a little bit rant-y, but today I’d like to talk about reports,…
Trench Warfare of Mindsets in Switzerland’s Approach to The COVID-19 Pandemic
HÜSLER SAMIRA-SALOMÉ & PYTHON ANNICK MARIA ILDIKO On 26 March 2020, the Federal Council declared an extraordinary situation in accordance with the Epidemic Act and issued a set…
#Afterlives: Shaheen Bagh and the Force of Foundation
February 2020. The pedestrian overpass is covered in banners. Crossing its elevated walkway, only flashes of the sky can be glimpsed through the hanging tarp, cloth and card,…
Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber: “A Matter of Priority”: The Covid-19 Crisis in Indonesia
Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, University of Cambridge COVID-19 is wreaking havoc in Indonesia. The government ignored the crisis for too long, relying on a dubious religious discourse of divine pro…
If Meat Could Tell Stories: A Tale of Assam during Coronavirus
I can smell it, someone is cooking chicken, I screamed and ran to my sister. I think it is the neighbours. Let us call them and find out…
Health Insurance for the poor: insights from the Kenyan coast by Jacinta Victoria Muinde
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
Karen Strassler on her new book, Demanding Images
https://www.dukeupress.edu/demanding-images Interview by Ilana Gershon Ilana Gershon: Your book is about the image-event, and I am wondering if you could explain what an image-event is, and how you…
Quaran-Teen 2020: Our Constantly Evolving Society
[The following students are high school seniors at “KTH School” taking International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology. After their final IB exams were cancelled, they decided they would…
Book Review: Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea Ravenelle
In Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy, Alexandrea Ravenelle offers a new ethnographic study that examines working life for people in the gig economy…